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Andrew Rugasira, Author of A Good African Story, Details the Global Branding of a Social Enterprise

Andrew Rugasira, author of A Good African Story, has written an article in Uganda Diaspora News about how his coffee company introduced a new economic model to Uganda. After initial scepticism, they managed to bring on board coffee growers (small-scale farmers in Kasese), bankers who could finance them and end-product merchants such as supermarkets.

Of the project that started in 2003 as a social enterprise, Rugasira says: “This story is a testimony to the potential impact social entrepreneurs can have on Africa’s agricultural economy”.

In 2003, I had an idea: to work with coffee farmers in the Kasese district in western Uganda, and to support them in producing quality coffees, which we would roast, pack and brand for both the local and international markets. Uganda produces over three million bags of coffee a year (approximately 200,000 tonnes) but most of this coffee is exported in its raw form – as green beans for processing in the consuming countries of the developed world.

What no Ugandan coffee company had done before was to place a branded coffee product on supermarket shelves in South Africa and the UK. This became my mission and has been my journey for the last eight years.